anachred

(Posted here for reference. At twitter, I'm "yeff")

• 23:21 Math Contest Prep is DONE and I am going to bed. Hey, almost 6 hours of sleep tonight, much better than last time. #fb #
• 20:56 Woo! The entire NYT Saturday puzzle, with NO HINTS (cheats, lookups, whatever). Untimed, but excellent! #fb #
• 20:57 The SACMATH Middle School Contest went well, and I'm not completely exhausted. Win - Win! Now having glass of wine and relaxing #fb #
• 20:58 @StevenGould One day, there will be a secondary market for "moon pee". From Real Moon Water! #fb #
• 21:27 woah nellie! Did Stanford (men's American) football really beat USC 55-21! A-mazing! Go Cardinal! #fb #

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For reasons I can't explain now but will after the reveal, I was a little concerned about my assignment when I first received it. Not in a way that reflected badly on my recipient, but there seemed to be a mismatch between what they wanted and what I thought I could do a good job writing.

...but then I poked about their archive a bit, and realized that actually, they do ALSO like some elements of the canon that fit very well with what I'm interested in writing. Thank God.

This does not, by the way, mean that I was NOT paired with someone I know, as I don't have all of your tastes memorized. Nor does it mean that I was. Wait and see!

Anyway, now I can squee. SQUEEE! I now love my assignment!

Without any give-away details, how do you all feel about yours?

• 10:46 @inkyelbows That 'things not to say' comic is golden. #
• 10:48 @tiffsoutherland That's why you need Smarties! Pure sugar is an in a pinch substitute for caffeine. (Just watch out for the crash later.) #
• 10:50 Wearing my TCU shirt to booksigning (2-4pm, Barnes and Noble in Highland Village, TX) today. GO FROGS! *ahem* #
• 10:57 Then I'll be Chatting up Vampires with @CandaceHavens and @GwenReyes. 5pm in Dallas. bit.ly/QOoyu Y'all know you want to be there. #
• 12:30 Is it just me or do people seem to drive meaner the closer they get to shopping malls? #

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And we gave out 46 of them today at the SACMATH Middle School Contest.



As before, the contest was a lot of work and a lot of fun. We had a good set of volunteers, who got all the grading done zippy quick and thus helped keep the contest on time. The kids seemed to have fun, the parents and teachers were very appreciative, and there was much cheering when awards were announced. All in all, it went as well as I could have ever hoped.

One contest left: The High School Contest on December 5. I need to plan a little farther ahead for this one because of the Thanksgiving holiday, but now that I've done two I'm starting to feel like I just might know what I'm doing (a little bit). I'm already having ideas for how to change the contests in the future to make them more exciting and bring in more "fun" events.

But for now, it's a glass of wine, a good night's sleep, and a contest that might just be called a success!

Only the title has any connection with sounis, but it's extra compelling to make up for it. The biography manga is recommended as being brilliant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_Gen

Does this manga create confusion with the Japanese editions of mwt? What do they call Gen in Japanese?

Off-topic majorly, here, but I was wondering, does anyone here have any good recommendations for books with steampunk settings? I've read the Matt Cruse series by Kenneth Oppel and I've been hearing some good things about Leviathan, but otherwise, I'm pretty lost. I love steampunk and would like a few recs to read for ideas for a story I want to write. Help, please?

Love you. Miss you.

While I'm usually okay with ill-advised cover songs, and while I have no objection to Michael Bublé in principle, I don't want him within 5 miles of the Eagles' back catalog.

A misty night, an open highway, and a perfect change of gear, carve out the turn, leap forward off the gas.

I've been meaning to do this since July, but since I mentioned it in my comment in the birthday post... What, me? Procrastinate?

I spent a little over a week in Greece this summer, and could not stop taking pictures (I think I took around 700 photos) . . . not just the typical tourist pictures though. I kept seeing things and relating them a little bit to how I picture Eddis, Sounis, and Attolia. So, I figured I'd share a few of the pictures. I've left out most of the really touristy ones, the ones my sisters and me, and most of the really obviously ancient or really obviously modern stuff. So, very little Parthenon, Temple of Olympian Zeus, or Temple of Poseidon here -- it's more the stuff around the corner, the landscape and olive trees (lots of trees ... I'm weirdly obsessed with taking pictures of trees), some Byzantine architecture, and of course some ancient ruins because I couldn't not.

(Link to the album is here.)


The photos of costume I have are mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries so later period than I imagine (I didn't have my camera on the day we were looking at earlier costume), but I found the quality of the textiles, the detail, and the effect of layering fascinating and figured I'd share them too.

So, let me know what you think. Are there any photos that remind you of quotations or scenes? How do you imagine the landscape?

On both IE and Firefox, I suddenly have a sort of fake toolbar with scrolling newspaper headlines and ads on the top of my screen, and on Firefox it blocks my actual LJ toolbar.

Does anyone know why it's there (a virus?) and how I can get rid of it? There's no obvious means of closing it. I ran Symantec and it says there's nothing wrong.

ETA: Solved! See comments.

Smart brain. Of course Danilaw likes 20th century rock music. First of all, it's a worldbuilding point (which I will not spoiler.) But if he speaks archaic English, however haltingly, it also lets him talk to the people on the generation ship, now doesn't it?

1629 words on Grail today--just over quota, but as soon as batwrangler gets here, I have to go to New Jersey. This is my last commitment for a good long time, though, and I'm looking forward to crawling into my hole and pulling it closed after me until I get a couple of these damned books written and revised.

The more accomplished I become as a writer, and the more confident I am in my skills, the worse my drafts get. In a lot of ways, this thing I am writing looks very much like a really elaborate outline. It's full of bracket notes that say things like [show don't tell] and [make these characters' voices sound different]. I'm choosing to believe that this is because my subconscious has accepted that there will have to be heavy revisions once I figure out what the book is about, and the only way I have ever been able to figure out what the book is about is to work through it.

Sometimes I outline. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I go back and outline stuff I've already written to see where it's going and get some distance on it. Sometimes I write out of order and sometimes I'm linear. Sometimes I scribble bits of scenes on scrap paper. There are no rules, only tactics that work or do not work.

Lately, my process seems to involve writing all sorts of sketchy things, bits and fragments and scribbles--and then later constructing a narrative out of them. This would terrify me, except I already did this on Chill and Bone & Jewel Creatures, and the final drafts of both books strike me as rather decent work.

Mean things: fears of the Other, barbarians, fretting by the phone.

16640 / 100000 words. 17% done!

My poem "Minotaur Noir" to Goblin Fruit, guest-edited by Mike Allen.

3 rolls of film taken last December... and which I procrastinated developing til now.

While there were mistakes (like gloved hands coming into the frame ><) here are a few of the happy accidents :) Click for full-sized versions.
Cross-processed; Kodak Elitechrome (blue-r ones), Ektachrome (green/yellow ones)






( Japan & Batam )

For a first 3 rolls, I'm quite happy! Just wish film could be less draining on the wallet ):

(P.S. what regular - non-slide - film do you find the best, and which lab's the cheapest for regular, 135mm processing?)

I recommended Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief to my agent and my husband this week. By the time Mr daw had read about five pages, he said I was right. It was an interesting book, though he couldn't say why. Yay! Another convert. And Turner has a fourth book coming out in March.

Dear Makers of Gungrave,

First episode promised me crystalline vampires, lots of shooting, and coolness a la Vampire Hunter D.  The next three episodes delivered a sappy mafia drama.  WTF?

No love,

Me.

Mirrored from One Crazy Dame. Comment here or there

Or maybe it's just me and my camera. Most of it came out exposed, alright, but I feel a little let down by the shots.

( +2 )

As always, the rest of the set is here. Enjoy!

This past Thursday was as strange a day as I've ever spent in my life...

After last January's humungous ice storm [see http://ozarque.livejournal.com/573430.html and http://ozarque.livejournal.com/573613.html ], we immediately bought a much bigger and more powerful generator than the little one we'd had before. George put in a lot of advance time doing sub-assemblies so that he could hook it up more quickly, and that was wise of him. But getting it done meant that he had to turn off all the electric power to our house, which in turn meant that Sheba and I would have been without lights, water, heat, and bathroom facilities while he worked.

In a city, we'd just have rented a motel room for the day, but where we live there are only two motels and both of them are permanently rented by local workers. So that was not a possibility. He could have taken us to my daughter's place in Fayetteville, but that would have added four hours of driving to an already-long task. That made no sense. The obvious thing to do was for Sheba and I to spend the day at Michael's mobile home, right there on our property, with all the necessary mod cons. Bathrooms. Furnace. Refrigerator. Running water. And that is what we did.

George started the job at about nine a.m., and finished at two p.m. And Sheba and I were very comfortable. We had our lunch in the refrigerator, I had plenty of stuff to read, plus my PDA with all its games. We took one of Sheba's little beds, and some of her blankets and toys, and bowls of dry dog food and water. All was well.

But it was so very strange. To be in Michael's house, surrounded by a lot of his things, made it so very hard to believe that he is gone forever. So many places where I'd seen him, so many times; I knew it was irrational, but I kept feeling as though I'd look up and he'd be there.

I had worried that Sheba might spend the day hunting for Michael, because his scent was everywhere; that would have been hard for me to watch. It didn't happen. I lay on the couch and read, and she lay curled up beside me the whole time, tucked in under one of her blankets. She wasn't any more interested in exploring and searching than I was, and I was grateful for that.

It was the adult thing to do, and it's wonderful that we now have a generator that will let us run all the electric stuff at our place if we get power outages again this year. It's wonderful that George, who wired our place himself when it was built, knows all about working with electricity and could do the job on his own.

But I am so glad that day is over.

Hey, Virginian types: if you are in the area, I have a signing today from 2:00-4:00 p.m. at the Midlothian Barnes & Noble: 4600 Commonwealth Center Pkwy, Midlothian, VA 23112.

Now I must manically go burn a playlist to listen to on the way down there, for my NaNo novel. Because there are not yet laws against brainstorming while driving.

Yet.